Cross-posted from my other blog.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of releasing version 5.17.8 of Perl.
Perl has had regular, time-boxed monthly development releases for about
three years now. This great improvement on the previous situation has been
accomplished partly by making the release process into something that can be
done even by people who, like me, are far from being experts in Perl’s
internals.
One of Perl’s long-standing traditions is that release announcements are
accompanied by an epigraph, chosen by the release victim volunteer.
Here are some notes about the epigraph I picked for 5.17.8.
One of the great things about open-source software is the ability to reuse
handy classes written by other people. But sometimes, you find yourself
using a class that doesn't have quite enough features for what you're trying
to do. What's the best way to deal with that sort of situation?
One option would be to monkey-patch new code into the class you're using —
just add extra subroutines to the original namespace. But unconstrained
monkey-patching has consequences that make it extremely hard to use in
practice. So the usual alternative recommendation is to subclass the
upstream code, add the new methods in the subclass, and then ensure that the
rest of your program always uses the subclass in place of the original. But
that approach has two flaws. First, it can be awkward to make sure your
subclass is always used in the right places. Second, it doesn't actually
fix the problem: you can still experience all the same issues as with
monkey-patching!
I gave a talk on this topic at this year's YAPC::EU in Rīga, and
it's getting a repeat (and extended!) outing at the inaugural Dynamic
Languages Conference today. But if you'd like to read the full
details, the corresponding paper is now on my website.
Enjoy!
I blog about Perl.